Part 8 (1/2)

'Of course, as you wish.' But then as I extract my wallet, she adds: 'It's just that you said you were desperate.'

'I am. For her.'

'And for yourself.'

'Only in so far as I find her suffering unbearable.'

'So perhaps I could help you with your desperation, help you to bear it.' She works on me with her soft eyes the way certain women will.

'Frankly I'd say desperation was the only normal response to this situation. I shall be desperate while she is like she is. She is the cause, not a symptom. And that's that.'

Miss Whittaker sighs, faintest half-smile wrinkling the corners of a generous pale mouth. 'As you wish. Dear Hilary,' she says again as I struggle to get her into her coat.

At the door she declines payment with a simple shake of the head. She has exactly my mother's serene sad wistfulness. For Christ's f.u.c.king sake. I hate people who won't take the money you owe them.

And once in the car I go for the Fulham Road with a real vengeance. Only at the second or third lights do I remember I'd offered to take her to Richmond. Of course. Suddenly it's very important that I honour this promise. I don't want to be thought a s.h.i.+t. I am not. Quite the contrary. I swing the car through a U-turn, alarming the inevitable pensioner in his Morris 1100. But when I get back to Fernshaw Road no one answers the door. She has put two milk bottles out that I don't remember seeing before. I look up and down what is after all a fairly long street. Could she really have walked so far?

At the first newsagents I pick up a few bars of chocolate and feed myself quickly, heading for Battersea Park. Who knows if a band mightn't be playing there? In the mirror I can see poor Hilary's lolling head. My eyes fill with tears. It is this I can't stand. I would so dearly like to give my daughter some chocolate, to see her gobble it up greedily like I do. I would like to give her at least this small piggy pleasure: good thick foil-wrapped chocolate. But the sugar brings Hilary out in rashes that cover her whole body.

I shan't be going to any faith-healers again.

The Good Samaritan January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: 'We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.' I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her a.n.u.s and lever the t.u.r.ds out. s.h.i.+rley does this. I simply can't.

Travelling to work, I am fascinated by the truth that I am both seriously mentally disturbed and at the same time among the most conventional of commuters on the Northern Line; the soberly dressed junior director of a highly successful software company, personally responsible for a whole new concept of computer usage on small- to medium-size building sites. Forty grand. Saab Turbo. Walletful of plastic. On/off highly erotic affair with lovely marketing director, Marilyn.

But the Telegraph tells me that an Indian in Walsall has been arrested for the attempted murder of his five-year-old Downs syndrome son using poisonous mushrooms masked in a hot curry. I buy the Telegraph now, not just because it is generally free of the kind of social pieties one finds in the other 'serious' dailies, but mainly for the eye they have for these sort of stories. The paper comments briefly on the deplorable morals of some ethnic minorities who not only abort healthy foetuses for no other reason than that they're female, but have a quite horrific record as far as handicapped children are concerned. 'All too often the social services cover up such incidents out of a perverse inversion of race discrimination. In March 1986 a young black girl suffering from elephantiasis was burnt to death in a caravan in Brixton. The story was not . . .'

Fire. The idea suddenly comes to me. Cleansing fire.

If the cause were sufficiently disguised . . .

For a moment I am quite rapt by the beauty of this solution. Fire. Pus.h.i.+ng my way through the crowd at Hammersmith with briefcase and squash racket before me, I am, as it were, enveloped in flames. I can really see myself doing it at last. This is actually possible.

But not in our beautiful Hampstead home.

For Mr Harcourt, I should have said, died last year, just as we were about to set off to Lourdes. Which is why in the end we never went. Being a profoundly lucky man he died suddenly: heart attack on the john, in company of the FT. In any event, we called off the trip to Lourdes for the various solemnities, quickly followed by the sharing of the spoils, which in this case, fortunately, were considerable indeed. Of course, the taxman took his whack, but what was left, in both our names I was relieved to see, allowed us to move up into the three-hundred-grand property bracket. Gainsborough Gardens, a gorgeous close a stone's throw from the Heath and no more than five minutes from the tube.

I'm not going to burn that place down.

'Unless somehow,' I'm saying to myself on the return journey of that same day, 'it's the sacrifice required of me.'

What a strange thought! Much easier surely, just to refuse her oxygen when she has one of her respiratory problems. How could they ever really know I'd done it on purpose.

But staring at my curiously double image in the carriage window, I remember an incident of a few weeks ago which made a big impression on me. I'd stopped to fill up on the Finchley Road and after paying, as I was walking to my car, somebody on the road hit a cat. The animal wasn't dead. Using just its front paws and squawking fearfully it dragged itself toward me in spastic jerks across a patch of pavement. With the winter evening's yellow sodium light, its mutilation was garishly lit. Its back haunches had been completely crushed into a pulp of black fur and blood. Its wild howls were attracting the attention of pa.s.sers by. Then, unable to pull itself further, it lay and writhed. Clearly the one thing to do to this cat was to get a brick, or even the jack from the boot, and put it out of its misery as soon as possible. Yet n.o.body did this. Not I, nor the home-going secretaries, executives, workers. n.o.body had sufficient compa.s.sion or courage to dirty their hands with a liberating violence, to bring down the brick, the jack on this poor animal's skull. Nor did anybody want to talk about it. They hurried by silently, not stopping. Perhaps, you could suppose, if it had been a question of playing Good Samaritan, of saving an animal with gla.s.s in its paw, a cut on its haunch, perhaps somebody would have stopped. For that is something entirely different and infinitely easier. But what was needed here was a savage coup de grace. And for maybe two or three minutes I hesitated, staring at this shrieking cat. Then got into the Saab and drove away.

House or no house, the advantage of the fire is that I would not need to be in the same room as her. I would not have to see her clawing for breath.

But what decides me in the end is Peggy's abortion. We have been seeing Peggy and Charles regularly for a couple of years now. Really, they are our only visitors. s.h.i.+rley did go through a period of trying to contact and make friends with other couples with handicapped children, and we would drive out to meet them some evenings or Sat.u.r.day afternoons. One does these things, looking for rea.s.surance, I suppose, others in the same boat. But it was too depressing. One's own handicapped child is bad enough, but the deformities and spastic contortions of a stockbroker's boy in Walthamstow, a railway worker's teenage daughter in Hounslow are too appalling. And far, far from rea.s.suring. Merely a reminder in fact of how lost and wave-tossed the shared boat is. Somehow the more these people insisted on the little progresses, the tiny achievements of their doomed offspring, the more obstinately cheerful they were, showing you family photos in fields of flowers, so the worse, at least for me, the whole scenario became. Until, with the reasonable excuse that we were only depressing ourselves, I managed to put an end to this interlude. s.h.i.+rley offered no resistance. She is not quite at my mother's level of martyrdom yet. In fact we will have these moments, sitting on the sofa for example, watching the box, when our fingers will meet, involuntarily it seems, and some kind of communication, of affection will pa.s.s between us.

We haven't made love for more than five years.

s.h.i.+rley has confiscated and burnt my euthanasia sc.r.a.pbook. Though I don't generally go in for hocus pocus, I find the fact that she burnt it excitingly symbolic. Anyway, I shan't be collecting any more such articles now. I sense the need for them is over.

Although never exactly a.s.siduous, all our old regular friends, Gregory and Jill and s.h.i.+rley's one-time school colleagues, have completely dropped off. They find it too hard to handle. s.h.i.+rley has her church friends of course, but she generally sees them in the morning or afternoon when I'm at work, or at Wednesday evening choir practice or after Sunday Morning Service. So our paths don't cross. Anyway I have no desire to see them. Their determined niceness grates on me, reminds me of Mother humming 'Count your blessings', under an umbrella on Park Royal Road with an empty purse in her threadbare pocket. There is a primal anguish behind it all for me, dating back I sometimes wonder, to some experience I can't even remember. I dream my dreams of mutilation.

But we do see Charles and Peggy. They come over once, twice, even three times a week, eat with us, talk, argue. They always come together because they are sharing a house he has persuaded his buddies in Camden Council Housing Authority to let Peggy have, pending demolition. This is a w.a.n.gle I'm sure. They've had the place more than a year now and there's no sign of the bulldozers. Meanwhile, G.o.d knows in what investments Charles has sunk the hundred and fifty-odd grand he got from Daddy-oh. In British Airports, I wouldn't be surprised. Nothing would surprise me.

I didn't realise they were lovers at first. Why? Because Peggy has always enthused over her lovers, always p.r.o.nounced herself everlastingly in love with them. Because, being our brother and sister, they have a good excuse for arriving together. Because Charles never shows a shred of fatherliness toward the exhaustingly exuberant Freddie. And because I always suspected he was queer.

'Peggy mentioned it,' s.h.i.+rley tells me one day.

'Mentioned it!'

'She was very offhand.'

'Wonders will never cease.'

'I was thinking, probably that's why he became so a.s.siduous about visiting us in the first place. To see her.'

I reflect on this.

'They don't show any affection together. Why don't they act like a couple?'

'The amazing thing about you,' s.h.i.+rley says, 'is that for all your super logic and supposed modernity, you're so incredibly traditional.'

'Sorry, I just thought it was common sense. You're lovers, you live together, you may as well act like a couple.'

'Why don't you just accept that people are different. You got angry with her when she was naive, now maybe she's being less so.'

But although in some obscure way I disapprove of Charles and Peggy, I do enjoy their visits. Discussing things between four people they seem manageable, whereas on one's own, or alone with s.h.i.+rley, hysteria is always just around the corner.

'Now the girl's five,' Charles tells us this evening, 'you're due for nappy relief, since a normal child would now be out of nappies.'

'Oh yes?' s.h.i.+rley asks chattily. 'What do we have to do?'

Charles begins to describe the bureaucratic procedure. He obviously enjoys this. His voice is quick, incisive, very faintly patronising in a teacherly sort of way. As he speaks, lean and sinewy, I watch how his thin fingers twine and untwine around a tumbler. His Adam's apple is also jerkily mobile.

'A wonder they haven't cut it,' Peggy remarks. She is helping Frederick with a jigsaw puzzle of the Changing of the Guard.

'No, there's no actual means test per se,' Charles rea.s.sures. 'More to the point they need a letter from your GP to the effect that the child really is incontinent.'

'Fair enough. After all, they're eight quid a box,' s.h.i.+rley says, 'and it's only paper and a bit of plastic in the end.'

'You know you can't use them at all in Was.h.i.+ngton State,' Peggy informs. 'Anti-ecological.'

'Then you present proof of purchase and you get the cash.'

I remark that eight quid, what, a week, isn't going to change our lives in any major way, is it? It hardly seems worth the time in the queue. In fact and I make the mistake of getting drawn into an old argument the whole point about state help, or any such sops of this kind, is that they merely draw your attention away from the real issue while you waste your time picking up crumbs.

'And what is the real issue?' Charles asks sharply.